


Endgame Multiverse: 2012

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Multiverse, What if?, actions have consequences
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-02-29 05:29:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18772153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: Following through on a multiverse offshoot from Endgame: the one from the first Avengers movie





	1. Chapter 1

After Rogers got off the elevator, Jasper looked over at Rumlow. He could play it cool, like he knew all the time that _Captain America_  was committed to HYDRA, like he was close enough to Pierce's inner circle to have that kind of knowledge. Anyone else, he might have. But Rumlow was Pierce's personal doberman and knew who Pierce saw and talked to, so Jasper didn't bother. 

"Did you know?" he asked, not bothering to hide his confusion. 

Rumlow made a face and shrugged, unconcerned. "That the Director was conditioning him? Yeah. That they'd told him why? Nah." He rolled his shoulder and Jasper could hear the pop. "But it'll make shit a lot easier if we don't have to do it behind his back." 

Jasper filed the first part away for later research; he hadn't known that there'd been any plan for Rogers already in place. His job was to watch Stark, not pay attention to the others. But it was good information and could be leveraged. Stern paid well for this kind of news. 

* * *

The Battle of New York was over, but the shitshow that was the Avengers letting Loki escape was just the beginning. Brock only paid attention to the parts that concerned him, which weren't many; once it became clear that Loki had fled the planet (christ, that sounded weird, even in his head), the STRIKE teams were put back on regular duty. Fury was taking fire from all sides -- for disobeying an order from the WSC, for letting the Avengers dick around with Loki instead of putting him directly into STRIKE hands and SHIELD custody, for not securing the Tesseract better, for all the casualties littering Midtown -- but it was pretty much the same old crap for the rank and file.

For the parts of Brock's duty that wasn't regular rank and file crap... Pierce was pissed off, but not at Fury. Stark might wind up like his old man, though, dead in a ditch somewhere. He'd been easy enough to keep control of while Stane had held the leash, but the whole Iron Man crap was something else. And getting the fucking Tesseract stolen was something else from that, too. If he had to go down, there'd be a long list of guys who'd volunteer for the job; Stark was a dick to everyone in a STRIKE uniform. But Brock didn't think it would be any of them. Pierce liked poetry, liked symbolism, liked symmetry. If Stark was going down like his old man, he would go down _exactly_  like his old man: via the Soldier. 

Which in turn reminded Brock of Rogers, for the obvious reason. And reminded him to ask Pierce if Rogers was cleared to hear everything or if he was still on the bottom rung of HYDRA secrets. 

"What are you talking about?" Pierce asked, going very still. They were in his office, ostensibly to talk about the Director's security for an upcoming overseas trip. Pierce had been signing a pile of paperwork, but the pen had frozen as Brock had spoken. "Rogers doesn't have any idea what's going on. Operation Secret Empire is still in Phase Two." 

_Shit_

"What happened? Tell me everything." 

There was Pierce's regular speaking voice, there was his Director/Secretary voice, and then there was the voice of the Supreme HYDRA and that's the one that Brock was conditioned to fear and obey. He started to talk. 

* * *

"Cap, you got a minute?" Tony called after Captain America -- he had a real name, but not in Tony's inner monologues -- once they were back out in the hallway after Fury's latest bitching-out. At first, Tony had resented Cap turning up to defend him from Fury, as if he needed help dealing with anyone, but it made the bitchings-out (bitching-outs?) go faster and it made Cap feel better and Pepper was trying to get him to be more considerate of others. Win-win. 

Cap gave him a look that was a little wary and a lot 'I have literally nothing but a lot of minutes' and Tony chose to focus on the latter. In person, Cap was a lot less than the man his father had practically pined for, but also maybe a little more. He was an actual person, to start with, and not some angelic slab of lab-grown beef who sang "The Star Spangled Man" if you pulled the string in his back, and Tony maybe was still surprised by that most of all. 

"Your fight with Loki in the Tower," Tony began, drawing them off to the side of the hallway. "What if I told you it wasn't Loki?" 

He expected Cap to look confused, maybe argue it a bit. He didn't expect Cap to go all pale and like he needed the wall he was leaning against to hold him up.  "What do you mean?" 

The question, at least, was expected and Tony uses the force of his charm and the element of surprise to get Cap back to the Tower for lunch and some show-and tell. Cap was a year out of the ice and his brain was back in 1945 most of the time, but there was no way Tony was going to get _anyone_ to believe what he was about to tell Cap without some physical evidence. 

Lunch was pastrami on rye with Cel-Ray because it had been Dad's comfort food and it was apparently Cap's comfort food as well because Tony'd rarely seen anyone so happy to see a can of celery soda and the pastrami had been greeted by a grateful sigh. 

"Okay, so here's where we start the show," Tony announced once they were both done, leading Cap over to the couches. "Stop me at any point if you get confused."

It wasn't the penthouse, where Pepper at this moment was interviewing contractors for the repairs, but it was the nice guest quarters floor, so Jarvis had a good projector to work with and plenty of windows to shade before they began. 

"I was doing some work on the whole 'portal to another dimension' thing," he began, not bothering with specifics because his audience was a man whose last science class had covered the brand new invention of the wheel. And because he didn't want to think about the way he'd known he was going to die alone in another galaxy. "And I thought I'd go back and look at the footage of them using the tesseract as a key. And then I got nostalgic and wound up going ahead a little. And that's when I saw this."

Jarvis, anticipating, dished up the footage of The Other Tony Stark skulking around as the Avengers dealt with Loki. 

"Is that a mask?" Cap asked, reaching out to hesitantly touch the solid light image and then jerking his hand back when it moved because _solid light_. Jarvis, feeling more pity, oriented the picture so Cap could see better. 

"It's not a mask," Tony answered. "I wanted to figure out who he was and where he came from, so I asked Jarvis to comb through all the surveillance feeds and it was in the process of doing that where we found this:"

The footage of the Cap-on-Cap fight started playing. Tony had never watched it with the volume on; once he'd verified the timestamps, he'd just been looking for any kind of flicker that could be an image inducer or a shapeshifter or anything else to give the game away. But there had't been, had instead been a lot of well-matched fighting with his Cap against someone else clearly pulling their punches.

"You thought it was Loki because it had to be Loki, Occam's Razor. But the problem is that while you were fighting your doppelganger, Loki was busy elsewhere."

Cue the footage of Loki versus a whole bunch of STRIKE agents, none of whom could keep up with a guy who'd been practicing with knives for a thousand years. 

"And while there's more and I'm never really going to get bored of STRIKE agents getting embarrassed, this is the part we want to look at:"

The shitty, beat-up car appeared and grew larger so that you could see the people inside.

"We're consorting with criminals, by the way," he said casually, doing jazz hands to blow up the image even further. "This Scott Lang dude is currently in San Quentin. And has been for the last four months. I'd make a joke about teleportation, but then this happens. Roll tape, Jarvis!"

Cap reacted a lot less than Tony imagined he would to seeing their doppelgangers suddenly wearing what look like racing onesies that reminded him of something he couldn't recall, poke at their wrists, and then disappear while Lang looked frustrated. Against his better judgment, Tony asked why. 

"I'm in a building that talks looking at pictures in the air that I can touch," Cap replied with a helpless shrug. "Why is _that_ any weirder than _this_?" 

Because 'that' was evidence of _time travel_  and 'this' was stuff he'd started building when he was seventeen, but a tiny part of him accepted that, to Cap, there really was no difference in how strange it was. And then he realized that he hadn't actually said the part about time travel out loud, so he did that. 

"That's us from the future?" Cap half-whispered, looking again like he'd seen his own ghost. He rubbed his face with one hand, like he could make what he saw go away. Tony sort of understood; he didn't want to think about going gray and winding up looking so much more like his dad. Cap, on the other hand, only looked a couple of years older and shouldn't be so vain. 

"Are you really that disappointed that we're apparently friends?" 

Cap turned to him. "Grateful, maybe," he replied and there was a grin with it that faded before Tony could figure out how he felt about it. "But that's not it. If that's me in the future... What he said to me...."

Telling Cap that Bucky Barnes was alive was probably an obvious choice to get the reaction it did. And Future Cap would know that. But Present Cap was maybe hoping otherwise. 

"They never found his remains," Present Cap said, mostly to the floor as he hung his head, elbows on his knees. "Never a trace. I even asked Peggy in case Fury was lying to me about that, too."

The 'too' at the end was bitter and Tony suspected that if -- or, apparently _when_ \-- they became friends, the permanent low-level distrust of authority displayed by Captain America, of all people, would be the reason for it. That, and the ass comments. Tony wasn't necessarily interested in tapping that, but he could appreciate the aesthetics and be envious. 

"But what if the me from the future was telling the truth?" 

Tony really, really hated to be the one emotionally supporting anyone and not the one being supported. He made exceptions for Pepper, or at least he tried to, or he meant to try to. Anyone else was just a lot, you know? Even when he hadn't just nearly died twice in a couple of days.

"If he was telling you the truth, then he would have given you more to go on," is what he managed to say. If the emotional capacity parachute failed, please deploy reserve resort-to-reason. "Why would he keep that kind of information from you?" 

Cap shrugged helplessly. "To avoid messing up time too much?" 

Tony considered not rolling his eyes to absolutely count as emotional support. Full credit. "That's not how time travel works, if we could get time travel to work. Which we apparently will while both of us are still relatively young. But when we do, that's not how time travel will work. He was just playing you for time and space, not trying an end run around some mythical butterfly effect." 

It wasn't until after a still-shocky Cap left to go back to wherever SHIELD was storing him between missions that Tony realized what the time-travel suits reminded him of. 

"Jarvis, pull up the file on Hank and Janet Pym. Pictures first, please." 

_There_. It wasn't the same at all, but Tony was very good at reverse engineering anything and he could see the familial resemblance between what Hank Pym had worn and what The Other Tony had been wearing. Christ, he hoped it wasn't Pym who discovered time travel. Tony's ambivalence about the Stark Family Legacy waxed and waned, but... it had better not be Pym. 

* * *

Steve hated the future. A lot.

Everything he knew was gone. Everyone he trusted had betrayed him. Everything they had taught him about the time he was in the ice was bullshit because they hadn't been giving him history, they'd been giving him propaganda. 

He's been a fucking HYDRA agent for as long as he'd been out of the ice because they are the ones who dug him out of the ice. And now he was going to die because he'd figured it out. 

The first time they'd tried to kill him, he hadn't even realized it. Accidents happened in live-fire exercises. The second time, he'd realized it hadn't been an accident, but he'd thought the culprit had been outside the organization because why would his teammates try to kill him? The third time had left no doubt as to the who, but he'd been training with Rumlow's squad for a while now and he'd known how they worked and that's what had saved him. The fourth time... the fourth time was going to work because he'd been beat to hell from Rumlow's team and now this and he was trying to breathe past broken ribs and his left ankle was a mess from when he'd rolled his motorcycle and... And Bucky was the one they sent to kill him. 

His future self hadn't been lying last month. (God, has it only been a month since the aliens?) He wanted to live long enough to tell Tony that he'd been wrong, but he didn't think he would. Bucky wasn't Bucky, he was someone else wearing Bucky's face and that someone was a robot that did what it was told to do and didn't stop until he succeeded. And that robot had been told to kill him. 

(He wanted to believe it wasn't really Bucky, that it was someone else who just looked so much like him that Steve's breath caught. But he knew those eyes and he knew that voice and he knew that scar on Bucky's right hand and he knew that Future Him hadn't been just trying to stun him into letting go.) 

They wound up on the roof of One Franklin Square, the two of them going at it hammer and tongs. Bucky had strength and endurance on him right now and didn't know he was trying to kill his brother and that was the only reason Steve was still able to fight, he thought. He was really completely indifferent to living right now, if he were honest. There wasn't anything in his life that wasn't broken or destroyed and yet he couldn't give up, not while Bucky didn't know who he was, who they were. So he tried to talk to Bucky, tried to keep him from accomplishing his mission, and forced himself to stand and fight for the both of them. 

They fell together; he didn't know who'd lost their balance at the edge and who'd failed to stop them going over. He was losing consciousness and he wasn't sure he would wake up because it was a long way down. But the last thing he heard before it all went black was his name. 

* * *

If Clint hadn't seen them tumble off the building, Natasha didn't think they'd have ever found them. As it was, however, finding them was turning out to be the least of their problems. 

The Winter Soldier holding Desert Eagles on the both of them definitely ranked ahead of that. At this distance, he would've needed to be a lot more busted-up than he was right now to miss. 

"Are you with them?" he asked. In English, which was just as startling as the question. Russian, Sokovian, French, all with shitty accents, yes. She'd never have guessed that English was the one that came out like a native speaker. She hadn't realized that he even spoke English. 

"With who?" Clint asked back, confused. Natasha was, too, to be honest. This whole scenario was just not making sense. 

Steve was lying on his back next to where the Soldier sat on the floor, something tucked under his head as a pillow and field dressings on his arm and leg. He didn't look cuffed or otherwise restrained, but she didn't really have much of a reference point for the Soldier having a hostage. He didn't have a history of leaving his targets alive. He'd absolutely been trying to kill Steve earlier, but here they were and he looked like he was trying to _protect_  him. 

"HYDRA."

Clint looked over at her, a quick wide-eyed glance of _WTF_?

"Do I look like someone who'd join HYDRA?" Natasha replied in what she hoped was a reasonable tone of voice. HYDRA? What the ever-loving _hell_? 

"They surrounded him with HYDRA people," the Soldier said bitterly, his wild eyes looking down at Steve and then back up at her. "They gave him HYDRA books and HYDRA history and HYDRA tech. Why not HYDRA friends?"

Natasha only knew part of the story. Steve had only told her that something was off, that something had happened and everything he'd thought about the future was wrong. He'd sounded delusional, to be honest, and she'd begged him to meet her somewhere and then texted Clint the moment he'd agreed. And then they'd had to follow a blood trail from the base of the biggest commercial building in town to a construction trailer three blocks away because the Soldier had dragged him off. 

"HYDRA's been gone for seventy years," Clint said, like he was reminding someone of a holiday they'd forgotten. "The guy next to you died to make sure of that."

The Soldier's laugh was ugly. "No he didn't. And neither did I."

The conversation didn't get any less surreal -- _HYDRA?!?_ \-- but Natasha rolled with it as gently as she could because Steve was still lying there supine and still. If the Soldier was coming undone -- who knew what kind of headscrew Department X had done to him and what the breakdown would look like -- then it was up to her to minimize the mess and keep Steve safe in the process. Clint backed her up, right up until the moment he didn't. 

"Do me a favor," Clint asked the Soldier. "Drop one of those cannons and pull your hair out of your face for a second?" 

Natasha was confused, but the Soldier was not. He narrowed his eyes at Clint and she prepared to react to a bullet being fired. The walls wouldn't stop a .45 at this range, but she was more than ready to take another bullet fired by the Winter Soldier to make sure Laura and the kids didn't have to weep. 

"I was a big Commandos fan growing up," Clint went on, like he wasn't talking fast to the barrel of a pistol. "We all were. But I didn't want to be Cap. I wanted to be Cap's buddy, the sniper."

The Soldier made a face Natasha couldn't interpret, something like a sneer. "Bet today has changed your mind."

Clint huffed out a sour laugh. "Not really. Seen worse shit up close. And it makes Chuckles the Clown over there a lot less crazy-sounding." 

"Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?" Natasha finally demanded, wariness turning to annoyance. "I don't like feeling left out." 

There obviously wasn't going to be any imminent shooting, so if Clint and the Soldier were about to play Obscure Reference Bingo, she'd go get a sandwich or something. 

"Natasha, I'd like to introduce you to someone," Clint said and she could hear him smile even as she kept her eyes on the Soldier. "This is Bucky Barnes."

The name didn't immediately register with her, even as it made the Soldier flinch hard. Then she put everything in context: the Commandos, Steve, and the history she'd barely looked at when they'd defrosted Captain America because it hadn't mattered to her at the time. Bucky Barnes had been a member of the Howling Commandos, the only one to die in the war. Except, apparently, not. He'd become the Winter Soldier instead. 

"Do you know what year it is?" she asked. Because if he'd just remembered who he was -- maybe the percussive maintenance she'd performed on Clint had worked the same here -- then maybe he was like Steve had been and didn't know where or when he was. 

The Soldier -- _Barnes_  -- looked at her like she was asking an insultingly stupid question. "It's June 23, 2012 and I'm not flashing back to the war. And you never answered the question: are you HYDRA?" 

Or maybe he was like Clint and had watched it all happen and been powerless to stop it. _Fuck_. 

"We'd never tell you if we were," she said, holding her hands up to show helplessness. "But we're not. We _are_ completely confused, however."

The story Barnes told was insane, but no more insane than a Howling Commando being the Winter Soldier. HYDRA had never been destroyed, had instead chosen to infiltrate everywhere instead of trying to take over anything. SHIELD was a front, Alexander Pierce the new Schmidt, and every single STRIKE team had been populated by believers. They were everywhere, in everything, from Congress to the local PTA and that was just here. 

"Well, sure seems like we got work to do," Clint said when Barnes fell silent. He gestured with his chin toward Steve. "What's with Chuckles?" 

Barnes looked down at Steve like Steve was his reason to be. Achilles and Patroclus. "He's sleeping it off, mostly. Could use a doctor, but there isn't one I trust."

Clint made a noise and Natasha looked over at him. "A friend of a friend is a PJ down at MacDill. Pretty damned sure he's not HYDRA's type. Can I call him?" 

Natasha was going to ask what the hell a PJ in Tampa had to do with anything in DC, but Clint had that look that meant he was burying the lede again. 

They met Sam Wilson in the middle of nowhere, Virginia and yes, Clint absolutely was. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sam was sitting in a dive bar on the Kentucky side of Fort Campbell nursing a longneck when his phone buzzed. 

"Hey, man," a somewhat familiar voice began. "I got a question I'm hoping you can answer." 

Clint Barton's name was in his contacts because Pete had included the both of them in enough group texts over the years to make it necessary. They'd met a dozen times or so, got on in the way friends-of-friends who saw each other somewhat regularly did, and this wasn't the first time he'd called. But it had been a while. 

"I can try or I can make shit up," Sam answered, picking at the label on the sweating beer. "Whatchu need?" 

Barton wanted to know if he knew a PJ or a Corpsman he trusted who was currently stationed in Virginia; a friend of his didn't need an ER, but could use a looking-over and a few stitches. Sam took the explanation and what it had left out and worked it over for a second in his mind. Barton was some kind of spook; he'd been Army and then he'd gone over to the Feds and he told people he was DSS, but they all sort of knew that that wasn't quite it. A friend of his could be anyone, but that they weren't heading over to a doc-in-a-box clinic made it less likely to be most people. 

Sam looked at his watch, at his buddies shooting pool, and told Barton he could be in Virginia in a little more than an hour if he stepped on it. 

"You can't just take off for a joyride, can you?" Barton sounded skeptical. "Also, this is... this is potentially really fucking fugly, Wilson. I don't know what kind of shit is going to hit the fan, but there will be shit and it will stain. I don't want you drawing attention to yourself when I can just meet some corpsman in a parking lot." 

Sam was at Campbell for JSOC action because Higher didn't want him filing retirement papers 'because he was feeling low.' He wasn't feeling low, he was feeling fried and tired and like it had been four months since he'd watched his best friend fall from the sky. And he was both halfway out of fucks left to give and ten hours short for night flight hours. "I appreciate the concern, but it's not necessary. Just tell me where you are and I'll roll up with the headlights off." 

They picked a place pretty much at random, the possibly ironically-named Fancy Gap, Virginia winning the contest. From there, Sam just had to get back on base and pick up his wings, which wasn't that hard because he was indeed short night hours and Falcons were strange enough back at MacDill, let alone here at an Army base, so him going up without a wingman... he could talk himself into the sky, let's just say. 

The wings could be really dramatic if he wanted them to be, all flash and power, but the Falcon kit had been designed for stealth and Sam got to the probably-not-ironically-named Fancy Gap without drawing eyeballs. He didn't even flare with the landing, which was in the middle of a field. Barton and someone else were sitting on the roof of an SUV parked behind trees so that it was hidden from the road. The someone else turned out to be Natasha, who was the kind of pretty that spies usually weren't but had a grip that said "gun calluses." 

His patient turned out to be Captain America and that's not even the start of when things got weird. 

"Well, fuck," Barton said, looking at his phone with the hand not holding the flashlight over where Sam was stitching up what looked to be a knife slash below the bottom rib. "Cap, you are officially a wanted man after you murdered Nick Fury in your apartment. SHIELD has the weapon with your fingerprints." 

Sam paused as Captain America ("please call me Steve") tried to sit up and The Longhair Who Didn't Have A Name shoved him right back down. In the corner of his eye, Sam could see Natasha turn away sharply. He knew who Fury was -- black man turns up the head of a secret intelligence agency, he paid attention -- but not why... 

Oh. 

The Avengers, such as they were, were Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk along with two others nobody really talked about, the dude with the arrows and the lady with flame-colored hair. TMZ should've been all over that, but Captain America coming back from the dead to save the planet from aliens had been the lead story everywhere and people forgot about the rest. Sam forgot that he had meant to text Barton to joke about there finally being some military applicability to his archery hobby, which he was now glad to have forgotten because that would have made this evening extra awkward. 

"Why did I do it?" Captain America (who was definitely not Steve) asked as Sam started stitching again, aware that his presence was incidental and should stay that way. "It makes sense why they did it, but why are they saying I did it?" 

"Doesn't say," Barton reported. "PTSD? That's everyone's favorite." 

"They don't want him sick, they want him evil," Natasha said quietly and Sam was proud of his training that he did not flinch because he hadn't realized she'd turned up by his elbow. "They want to be able to shoot him down in the street without anyone complaining, not bring him in alive. They failed to do it on the down-low, so now they're going to do it in broad daylight." 

"What she said," Longhair added. "They can't let you blow seventy years of work." 

"Sam," Captain America put his hand over where Sam had been tying off the thread. "Get back in the sky and get out of here. This is getting bigger than everyone and you don't need to get caught up in it. Thank you for the handiwork, but now it's our turn to make sure you are intact come morning." 

Sam couldn't call Captain America by his given name even in his head, but he could conquer the idol worship long enough to talk back. "You are being framed for murder -- by the government -- so that you can be assassinated. And you expect me to go fly back to base and pretend I don't know that?" 

Barton aimed the flashlight at the ground. "Wilson -- Sam. This is the kind of shit nobody escapes from. You're not volunteering to help keep Cap here alive. You're volunteering to throw your entire life away and have it be burned to ashes and then peed on. Today it's him with the murder, tomorrow it'll be me and Natasha with something else heinous. They'll get to you by the end of the week. Choose what's good in your life over the very strong possibility that you will die in the shadows with the world thinking you're a monster. Nobody here's going to think less of you for it." 

Sam appreciated that he had no real idea of what he was offering to get into, that he couldn't really understand what public dishonor would feel like, that being hunted like prey was different than being shot at while plucking wounded soldiers off the side of mountains. He also knew that he didn't have a choice. 

"I will think less of me for it," he said, feeling the rightness of his decision as he spoke. "I didn't spend all those years training to give up when it got hard. I got into this gig to save lives and I had to learn the hard way that I can't save everyone. But I can do my best to save him and you and whoever else is caught up in this shit because whatever it is is clearly bigger than a breadbox. What I got that's good in my life is my self-respect and my honor and if that's good enough for Captain America to hold on to, then it's good enough for me. I can do everything he can, just slower." 

* * *

He'd told people he was going up to New York to get Tony to fix something, but Jim wasn't sure anyone had actually believed him. Sometimes he flew up because there was genuinely something wrong or because Tony wanted to do something to the suit, but sometimes he said something was wrong and it was really that the Eagles were on Monday Night Football and he wanted to watch it on Tony's bigass television. 

Tonight, it was betwixt and between because he definitely had non-suit stuff to talk about with Tony, but he also wanted Tony to look over the suit because things were getting a little weird in DC and he was maybe a little worried that he had been splattered by some of the shit. 

It was late, but Tony was up because Tony was always up. Pepper was probably up, too, because being the practical genius behind Tony was a 20-hour job on a good day. He'd called ahead and so when he got to Midtown, the semi-secret entrance to the suit flight deck was open. 

"Did you eat dinner at the table tonight?" were his first words, to Tony's back because twenty-some years of friendship meant that you didn't have to start a conversation with hello or with both participants facing each other. 

"Is today still Wednesday?" Tony asked, eyes on his soldering gun. 

"No, it is not," Jim answered as soon as he was free of the suit. 

"Then no, and yes I should be nicer to Pepper. JARVIS? Calla lilies for Miss Potts." 

"You should be nicer to Pepper no matter what, but that wasn't why I asked," Jim said, crossing the room and sitting on the stool Tony had dragged over for him with his toes. "If you'd eaten upstairs, there would have been half a chance you'd have spent two minutes paying attention to the world outside this lab. And then I would not have had to start at the absolute beginning of this story." 

Tony did put the soldering iron down, both because he was done and because he knew that Jim did not fly up late at night on a whim. He looked exhausted and Jim made a mental note to ask him about it later. First, however, he started the story he'd flown up to tell, from the absolute beginning. It involved a rumor of two men having a slugfest on top of One Franklin Square this afternoon, one guy with a garbage can lid and the other with a metal arm and then they both fell off the roof and disappeared. 

"It's all a rumor because there's no video footage, security cameras or social media," Jim said, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Rumor also says that SHIELD took it all because of the guy with the garbage can lid." 

Tony looked curious, but also suspicious because this would not have been the first time Jim had tried to distract Tony out of a bad idea and they both knew what Jim thought of Tony's latest plan. "Are you asking me to hack into SHIELD because you're curious or because your bosses are scared of Nick Fury?" 

Jim frowned, less at the question than at how he was going to phrase the response. "Let's just go with cautious curiosity. Captain America goes toe-to-toe with a guy on top of the biggest building in DC in broad daylight, falls off the back of it, and not only is SHIELD telling the public that no such thing happened, but they are also telling the Pentagon and Homeland Security that no such thing happened. I mean, it could be a collective mania, or whatever they call those things, but Nick Fury and Alex Pierce don't go this hard for some guy's ramble on facebook." 

Which was the actual crux of his own concern. He hadn't spent years doing damage control for Tony without having a finely tuned sense of what it took to actually kill something dead, like actually-really dead. This, today, was so far beyond most anyone's capacity that it staggered the mind. 

It took Tony a good forty-five minutes to find anything, which was about forty minutes longer than it usually took. The social media footage was mostly crap and he didn't see why they'd wasted the effort -- if you knew one guy was Captain America, then you could maybe tell that those flashes of light were the sun reflecting off the shield. But the footage was from an office tower a few blocks away and it might as well have been Godzilla versus Ghidra. One Franklin Square had its own security video of the roof, though, and that's where the action was. 

"Forget quashing it, they should sell this on pay per view and they'd get their budget for the year," Tony said as they watched Rogers and his opponent go at it hammer and tongs. 

Jim could only murmur agreement because it was fascinating to watch, even when the two of them ended up off-screen as the camera panned away. The longhaired guy was definitely some kind of powered-up dude, like a Thor or something, and the arm was just amazing. "You can't build anything that nice." 

"Because I'm too busy adding bells and whistles and Tron noises to your suit," Tony retorted with heat. But then he sighed. "The tessellating plates are... oh."

Cap had just kicked the longhaired guy in the face and his mask had come off. Underneath the mask was a normal face, not something weird or alien or disfigured. "Guess he's not Darth Vader, then," Jim murmured. "Cap seems surprised by that, too." 

Cap looked more than surprised and it wasn't until Tony paused the video that Jim realized that Tony was, too. 

"Holy fuckballs," Tony whispered, then looked up at Jim. "Rhodey, remember that little time travel thing I told you about last month?" 

Jim did because it had been the WTF sundae on a what-the-fuck day. And he'd also kind of forgotten about it because Old Tony wasn't trying to kill the planet and the Chitauri were. 

"Rogers was freaked out because his older self had told him that Bucky Barnes was still alive," Tony went on. "I told him it was just PSYOPS, that it was the one thing any version of him would have reacted to. I don't think he believed me." 

Jim looked more closely at the picture frozen on the screen. He'd have said that he pretty much knew what Bucky Barnes looked like, but here and now, he couldn't make any sort of positive ID. Tony sensed that and brought up a video clip from the war, Barnes and Rogers laughing at some joke lost to time. And then a still photo appeared, a candid from an off-angle where Barnes was wearing the blue coat he was always pictured in in history books and in the movies, but he wasn't smiling. He was exhausted and looking like a man who had seen too much war. This was the picture that looked like the man frozen on the left side of the screen, the dead eyes the same. 

"After Rogers had his moment, I went into Dad's archives to see what he had on Barnes," Tony said, dismissing the picture and replacing it with another. This one has Barnes with a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he sketched something out on a table; it might've been a machine and Jim vaguely remembered that Barnes had apprenticed as a draftsman before the war. "Turns out he had a lot. I didn't really go through them. Didn't even think to tell JARVIS to send copies to Rogers." 

There was something about Tony's voice that made Jim look over. Tony'd been all sorts of off since the aliens, since the shit with Vanko and Hammer, since he'd gotten back from Afghanistan with a fucking arc reactor in his sternum. Most of the time Tony coped with a strength that surprised most people, but sometimes the seams frayed and that was when Jim worried because he could see how close to the edge Tony was. There was no getting him to counseling, no chance to park him in front of a therapist and tell him to talk, no formal diagnosis of PTSD that would guide everyone toward a practical course of treatment and action. There was only triage and damage control and picking up the pieces and Jim rarely felt as helpless as this. 

"If this is Barnes, then he doesn't look too happy to see his best buddy," was what he actually said because nothing shut Tony down faster than acknowledging his mental health. "I'd like to think I'd be a little happy to see you after seventy years." 

Truth be told, Barnes didn't look like anything was registering. It was disconcerting to see. 

They watched the fight, which became less of a fight because Rogers had zero interest in fighting his erstwhile best friend and stuck to defending until he couldn't anymore. Barnes had no such hesitancy and things got worse for Cap until they got very bad indeed. Tony started typing when Rogers, beaten to a pulp, went off the roof and a second window popped up. But not before they watched Barnes, holding the shield, jump after him. The second window had the feed from the alley behind the building and that's how they saw Barnes and Rogers land on the shield, Barnes holding Rogers so that his head didn't bash against the ground. They lay there after impact for a long moment before Barnes got up and dragged Rogers to his feet and the two of them stumbled out of the camera's view like they were stumbling out of a foxhole in Bastogne. 

"JARVIS, call Rogers," Tony ordered. "And when he doesn't answer, try Romanov." 

He looked over at Jim. "A second Howling Commando comes crawling out of the woodwork looking remarkably spry for ninety-five and SHIELD disappears it because that's always their first reaction... or because they already knew?" 

JARVIS reported that neither Captain Rogers nor Miss Romanov were reachable, their phones going to voicemail. Tony told JARVIS to find the last known locations of both phones, which came back as DC. 

"Doesn't have to be shady," Jim pointed out because Tony's suspicions of government agencies weren't always based in facts. Even SHIELD. "Can't exactly give Barnes a welcome home party if the first sight of him is beating the hell out of his best friend and throwing him off a highrise." 

Tony typed some more. "There's nothing on Barnes in the system. If they were planning a party, there'd be something somewhere acknowledging that he's alive. There would at least be an email asking for his SSR files. But nobody's asking anything, least of all how to care for two dented supersoldiers." 

Jim frowned. He hadn't worked for the government for almost twenty years to accept a lack of paperwork as anything but intentional. Even for SHIELD. "Okay, that's a little shady." 

At that moment, the door slid open and Pepper, in a Strawberry Shortcake t-shirt and sweatpants, came in. She looked concerned in a way that Jim associated more with 'the world outside' and less that Tony had done something. "Tony, what's going on? Maria Hill just called and asked for me to tell you to call her on the phone you're not supposed to know about on a secure line. Hi, Jim." 

Tony looked up at him and raised one eyebrow. 

"Okay, a lot shady," Jim allowed, waving at Pepper. 

"JARVIS, Commander Hill's personal phone, the one she doesn't have on file at SHIELD. High encryption."  


* * *

Fancy Gap didn't have much to it, which was why they'd chosen it as a meeting place, but it did have an Econolodge and both he and Nat had fake IDs and on them, so getting a couple of rooms wasn't a problem. There was no point in going anywhere until they knew where they could go, which in turn required them to know what the fuck they were up against. There wasn't going to be any news until a more socially acceptable time of the morning -- HYDRA would want maximum exposure -- so they all crashed for a few hours. They left Cap in the room when they went to go take advantage of the breakfast buffet because there wasn't much to hide him with and there was a very strong likelihood that his face was going to be on the TV. Especially with Alexander Pierce scheduled to give a press briefing at 0900. Plus, he looked like shit.

"Aunt Sarah wasn't a fucking terrorist," Barnes muttered into his sausage and eggs in a suddenly silent room as Pierce explained on the TV how SHIELD had long had evidence that Steve Rogers had been consecrated into service of the Ten Rings as a child following his parents' conversion. "She was a godly woman and this is going to fuck him up more than whatever they say about him. Or me." 

Pierce's story went like this: because of the irregular way Cap had gotten recruited by the SSR, they didn't get around to doing any background research until he was already touring as Captain America the showgirl, at which point they figured it was probably safe to keep him doing that because it was harmless and easy to control. When he went AWOL to look for the 107th, they initially assumed he'd gone rogue and would join the Ten Rings, so him coming back with POWs had been more of a surprise than just the fact that a showgirl had taken on the Nazis and won. They took it as an act of good faith -- plus, they were desperate to win the war -- and let him form the Commandos. His unblemished service record and heroic sacrifice had led them to believe that he'd renounced the faith of his parents at some point after Sarah Rogers's death in 1936 and so he died a good guy and was reborn as one seventy years later. Nothing he'd done since his return had given them any cause to reconsider until recently and, in fact, Nick Fury had been one of the only ones to know about his Ten Rings past. Which was possibly why he'd gone over to Cap's apartment to question him about some odd behavior one of the STRIKE teams had witnessed.

"Jesus Christ," Clint muttered. "Rumlow tried to kill him how many times, and he is going to be the star witness." 

There was more, but nothing was going to come out of the press questions, so Barnes went back to Cap ("Before he does something stupider than usual") and Sam, sensing that Clint and Natasha needed a minute, went to go pack up food for the murder suspect still at large.

"Could've used Fury right about now," Natasha said quietly, barely audible over the noise of the other hotel guests reacting to the news, and Clint put a hand on her shoulder. He had been on good terms with Fury, but Natasha had been on much better ones; they'd recognized each other as kindred spirits.

"Coulda," he agreed, since Nat wasn't wrong. Fury had hated Washington politics, but he'd been able to move through it like a shark. "Could also use Stark and his better half. Think he'll believe the shit about Cap and the Ten Rings?"

Natasha made a face. "Coming from someone he trusted, maybe. Coming from Pierce as an excuse for why Cap killed Nick? No." 

Which was good, he supposed, but they couldn't exactly drive up to New York and ring the doorbell at Stark Tower. Not without SHIELD knowing; Fury had had plenty of surveillance on Stark beyond Natasha and now Pierce and his minions had access to all of it.

"We're going to need hair dye," he said instead. "For Cap, maybe for Barnes -- a haircut might do him, though." 

It was easier to think of Barnes as just another guy caught up in this mess, not as the 'there but for the grace of God go I' worst case scenario for himself. Forty-seven days since Natasha had done percussive maintenance on his brain and freed him from Loki's thrall; he woke up more nights than not from dreaming it had never ended. But it hadn't been a dream for Barnes, had instead been seventy years and he couldn't stop being terrified of that. So he tried to stop thinking about it entirely. Barnes was just a guy, was the him to Cap's Natasha. Sometimes it even worked.

"Maybe I'll go brunette again," Natasha mused, running her fingers through her hair and elbowing him in the ear in the process and he didn't think it had been accidental. "Get some civvies for everyone. Weapons, burner phones, a change of vehicle or at least plates... and cash. We are going to need cash."

Clint looked around the room, at the unattended iphones and travel bags and purses as people refilled plates at the buffet or started up conversations with strangers about how shocked they were or whether they even believed the charges. Place was about half-full, which was pretty impressive considering where they were. "Can probably get a couple hundred here..." 

It had been a long time since his carny days, but his job requirements had required those skills often enough that he was still sharp on the cusp of forty. The heavy gal in the pink top trying to get her young kids to eat while her purse dangled off the back of her chair... her open purse. The trio of dudebros on a road trip, all of them with their wallets in their sucker pockets. 

The dudebros weren't the easiest targets, but they were easy and Clint dropped a twenty in the open purse of the gal in the pink top; a little money she'd think she forgot to put in her wallet somehow. Handling kids alone was hard. 

He went with Sam and Natasha to the CVS, leaving Barnes in the room with Rogers and the rest of the cash in case something happened. He didn't particularly need to or want to shop; Nat knew what they needed and Sam could pick out his own Fruit of the Loom. But he wanted out of Fancy Gap to be able to call home away from anywhere people might remember him.

Laura was worried and telling her not to be would've been an insult. They'd kept him almost four days after the aliens were defeated because they weren't sure whatever Loki'd done to him was gone and then he'd been on a month's mandatory leave that Fury had let him go home for. He'd been activated nine days ago and now he was telling her that he was going rogue with Nat and Cap, who was not a murderer, and Bucky Fucking Barnes. And Bobby's pal Sam, at which point Laura said it was a strange goddamned clown car he'd climbed into... and then asked if it was really Bucky Barnes and was he still handsome.

"He looks like Jesus got ripped and then went on a bender," Clint told her because it was easier than telling her the rest right now. His fears could keep.

He couldn't tell her all the reasons she should worry but please don't, but he could tell her to watch out, to maybe consider taking the kids up to Kearney to see her brother or out to San Francisco to see her bestie, and to make sure the shotguns were to hand and break the rules this one time and keep the pistols loaded in the safe. "Laur, if anyone from SHIELD comes, you blow them away, okay? The only person other than Nat who should have known about you is dead and I don't know if there's another righteous soul in that organization." 

Laura wasn't a stranger to peril; they'd met when she'd been a journalist reporting from the war in Eritrea. She knew who she'd married and what kind of risks came with it, but kids made things all sorts of different. He told her he loved her and he trusted her and when he came home, it would be for good.

"You'd better plan on getting a real job, then," she told him instead of that she was afraid he wouldn't make it home. "I am tired of supporting your civil servant ass, cute as it is." 

They dyed Cap's hair brown and Nat's hair blonde and Barnes shaved his head to peach fuzz before they piled back into the car, unsure of where they were going but figuring north was probably good. They took 77 to 81 to 220 because it went through national parkland and they didn't want to get too close to 95. They stopped for a piss at a rest area and grabbed overpriced sandwiches for lunch and then a short walk later in the afternoon because all day in the car was murder. It was late in the day and the middle of the week and so there weren't too many people around despite it being listed as an easy trail. Rogers was moving stiffly but under his own power and Barnes was with him, so Clint was inclined to leave him be and move at his own pace. Sam jogged back and forth waving his arms like he'd forgotten his wings were back in the SUV, cracking jokes at Natasha as he passed her by and making her laugh despite herself. There was a bluff up ahead and Clint wondered what he'd see down below on the other side.

Iron Man speeding toward them had honestly not been on the list. 


End file.
